It’s not really news – 97 other people have bookmarked it on del.icio.us – but having just found it yesterday via NerdJournal (which I found in turn simply because he del.icio.us’d tecosystems) – I’m compelled to comment on the very cool Kubrickr for four reasons:

1. It shows what machine readable licenses can be used for
2. It shows the value of having a open API as does Flickr
3. It marries open content with popular platforms (Word Press natively, MT and others with ports [1])
4. It’s simple, but useful

Basically it works like this: you give Kubrickr a query term (try “sunset” or “georgetown” for some original Stephen O’Grady CC licensed shots [2] :), it takes those and queries Flickr for matching assets that are tagged with Creative Commons licenses. If you find a shot that you like and would like to incorporate into your Kubrick blog template (here’s tecosystems with a Kubrick front end), you can select that and cut out the part of the shot you’d like to use, then the application gives you a precut and framed image for your template. Very simple, but quite cool.

At the intersection of growth of both CC licensed content (spurred by network motivating services like Flickr) and personal web spaces – blog and otherwise – is an opportunity. We’ve been thinking of ways to incorporate Flickr based content onto our little home on the web, but as a commercial entity we need to be careful about licenses. Kubrickr shows us that what we’re thinking about is technically possible, and that’s cool.

[1] Thanks to Josue Salazar – who’s had some good comments here on tecosystems – for his port of Kubrick to MT.

[2] Note to Flickr – it’d be terrific if you guys could add license application to the list of allowed batch operations. I’d like to just tag everything at once, if possible.